Dr. Lesley Feracho is an Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and the Institute of African-American Studies. Dr. Feracho specializes in contemporary Latin American narrative and in particular women's narrative of the Caribbean, as well as Afro-Latin American narrative and poetry. Her current research involves cross-cultural literary texts (in both narrative and poetry) of women writers of African descent from the Americas (both Spanish-speaking and from Brazil). Dr. Feracho has published work on the poetry of Carolina Maria de Jesus, Miriam Alves and Nancy Morejon in the journals Afro-Hispanic Review and Hispania.

Feracho has also been awarded the 1999-2000 Lilly Teaching Fellow which she will use to develop a multimedia course at the undergraduate and graduate level on "Narratives of Revolution and Unrest in Latin America and the Caribbean." In 2001-2002 Dr. Feracho was a recipient of the DuBois-Mandela-Rodney Fellowship of the Center for African American Studies at the University of Michigan where she worked on the identity politics of comparative original and published works of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Zora Neale Hurston. Dr. Feracho's book Linking the Americas: Race, Hybrid Discourses and the Reformulation of Feminine Identity was published by SUNY Press in April 2005.